Originally Posted by MigRib
So, voice acting. Yes, it's expensive, it's time consuming and it forces that choice of cutting down on the amount of text. That's a price I gladly play for having voice acting.

It's not quite that simple. Another price you pay, is that in any big game (And RPG-s tend to be quite big) there are many more characters in the game, than voice actors available. Oblivion was notorious for everyone basically sounding the same and that was a major reason why many peaople loathed it.
Another big problem is, that voice acting is usually recorded far before a game gets released. When the developer wants to iterate and change things around, they simply can't without arranging another voice acting session.

Originally Posted by MigRib
And yes, in the time of Planescape and Fallout that would have been even worse, and that's why I don't blame them for that.

What little VA Black Isle games had, it was all very well done, had quite seasoned actors and extremely good VA direction evidenced by nobody sounding bored, or conveying wrong emotions. With almost all fully voice acted games such things are commonplace. Whoever Bethesda has as their VA director should be shot on sight for letting Stephen Russell of all people sound like a bum in Skyrim.

Originally Posted by MigRib
But, a few years latter, games that are considered classics by now, like Deus Ex and Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines were fully voice acted and there's not so many people bashing them for that. What did they loose because they were voice acted?

Oh? Deus Ex had notoriously bad voice acting and gets lambasted over it all the time by both the gaming press and various forums.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kihGm4KfY7khttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP6Nuf2lq0w
As for VTMB, yes, it's a classic as far as VA is concerned. Whover they had in charge of getting the actors to follow the script was a genius. Easily on par with VA in Thief games, which i consider pretty much the pinnacle of videogame VA.

In conclusion i think proper VA needs both a very good VA director, and many different voice actors (preferably at least one for every major character and enough for minor characters). Otherwise there is no point of doing full VA at all. Games like Oblivion and Deus Ex certainly suffered because of low quality VA, and these were AAA games with enormous budgets. A game like Wasteland 2 has simply no resources for full VA.